The IRS: A Scandal That Keeps On Giving
[guest post by Dana]
More on the IRS scandal… Due to that notorious computer crash that destroyed two year’s worth of Lois Lerner’s emails, Darrell Issa took action and subpoenaed Lerner’s hard drive. However, it looks like it might be a dead end:
Unfortunately, according to a source in the IRS’ IT department, that subpoena is unlikely to turn up much.
As a matter of practice, says the source, the IRS wipes damaged hard drives that are still operative. “If we can run them, we have to wipe them,” he says. If they will not run, they agency destroys them completely by magnetically degaussing them. In both cases, the hard drives are disposed of. “You’re not supposed to keep them around,” the source says. “You destroy the data.”
This is why the IRS should follow the rules…which are federal laws, actually:
The Internal Revenue Service is required by federal law to keep records of all agency emails and to print out hard copies of the emails to make sure they get saved in the event of a computer glitch.
And here is the relevant portion of the law per the IRS website:
“The Federal Records Act applies to email records just as it does to records you create using other media,” according to the IRS. “Emails are records when they are: Created or received in the transaction of agency business; Appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function and activities; or Valuable because of the information they contain.”
“If you create or receive email messages during the course of your daily work, you are responsible for ensuring that you manage them properly,” according to the IRS. “The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records. If transmission and receipt data are not printed by the email system, annotate the paper copy.”
“Please note that maintaining a copy of an email or its attachments within the IRS email MS Outlook application does not meet the requirements of maintaining an official record,” the IRS stated. “Therefore, print and file email and its attachments if they are either permanent records or if they relate to a specific case.”
Of course, this entire debacle at the IRS could have been avoided if the agency was not underfunded. Yep.
The IRS has been underfunded for years, and there’s strong reason to believe that it needs more money if it’s going to avoid issues like the one it ran into with conservative non-profits in the future.
Good lord. For a more thorough analysis of underfunding claims, check out Mark Hemingway. Of course Iowahawk had some fun with the underfunded claim, and was on a roll at the Vox Pitches hashtag :
My Forgetting To Pay Income Taxes For The Past 3 Years Shows Why I Deserve a Raise #VoxPitches
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 18, 2014
Why Wrapping My Dad's Camry Around a Tree Shows Why I Need a Ferrari #VoxPitches
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 18, 2014
–Dana